The Beatles’ New BBC Album On Air is a Low-Key, Freewheeling Delight

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Beatles’ unprecedented and unsurpassed eight-year run as the greatest, most popular musicians in the entire history of sound is that they succeeded despite having christened themselves with such a dopey name. Luckily, they were geniuses with impossibly appealing personalities—and here we are, almost half a century from their storied arrival in America, considering a new Beatles album that will no doubt sell millions and jostle on the charts Miley Cyrus. What’s five decades between fans?

New Beatle tchotchkes and new Beatle ephemera are eternal. So, too, are new Beatle books. But new Beatle music—the reason anyone cared in the first place—is inevitably rare this far removed from the initial conflagration, so we must salute On Air—Live at the BBC Volume 2, a sequel to 1994’s Live at the BBC. The new album is out on November 11, as is a remastered version of the first. Both are drawn from the hours and hours of live broadcasts the Beatles recorded for the BBC between 1962 and 1965, when they were young, eager to please, and still willing to take requests on-air from “all the girls at lower fourth in Blackburne House, Liverpool,” and the like.

The broadcaster’s total musical cache, some of which is lost to history, most of which has been recovered from private sources of varying quality (because, back in the day, the BBC recorded over the original tapes, the dictionary definition of penny wise, pound foolish), amounted to 53 different shows with a total of 275 songs. Many of those were hits and favorites the group recorded more than once on separate occasions, but among that total were 38 songs drawn from the Beatles’ sweaty club repertoire—songs by the likes of Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin—that the group never formally recorded on any of their studio LPs. This is where you can hear the Beatles as smarty-pants fans, showing off the breadth of their American record collections by covering songs such as “Lend Me Your Comb,” a Carl Perkins B-side, or “The Hippy Hippy Shake,” by Chan Romero, a one-hit wonder of Native-American and Chicano ancestry.

The first BBC release was an important piece of rock-and-roll history. This new one, like most sequels, is less revelatory and more of a lark. Both albums are delightful, though, in truth, neither is essential unless you are an orthodox Beatles nerd. The group’s early studio albums have all the raw energy you need. (Stop reading this and listen to Please Please Me and With the Beatles right now if you’ve never heard them all the way through.) But that said, the BBC recordings, also done in studio but more informally, are looser and all the more fun for it. Sometimes the four goof around; sometimes they shred their vocal chords; always they seem to be taking pleasure in one another’s musical company. They sound like they loved being a band. Listen to these songs back to back with the desultory, often listless outtakes from the 1969 “Get Back” sessions, when the group was on the verge of its bitter break-up, and you might cry.

This might be the BBC records’ greatest value for the casual fan: recorded as literal throwaways, they document the Beatles showing a little more leg than on their proper albums, giving even freer reign to their collective and individual personalities. The studio banter with BBC D.J.’s is often charming, occasionally cloying, but again the real proof is in the music: Paul crooning like the dewiest and sincerest of schoolboys on ballads such as “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “Til There Was You”; John taking the piss out of corny background la la la’s; George giving unabashed vent to Liverpudlian nasality as he sings, “Listen, do you want to know a seee-crut?”; Ringo bashing his drums with punk-ish commitment on “There’s a Place,” one of the more disposable of Lennon-McCartney songs, not that Ringo cares. One track has the group singing “Happy Birthday” to Mao Tse Tung for no apparent reason except maybe to see if they could get away with it.

HarperCollins has published a companion coffee-table book, The Beatles: The BBC Archives,which is the place to go if you want to pay $60 for a volume full of eye-glazing detail about every session the group recorded for the broadcaster. That might sound like I’m underselling the book, so I should add that for your money you also get facsimile documents such as an “Audience Research Report” tabulating reactions to “From Us to You,” a special that aired on Monday, March 30, 1964, from 10 a.m. to noon, on the BBC’s Light Programme. Ratings were commensurate with previous Beatles’ performances, with caveats: “Although ‘From Us to You’ proved very popular among the ‘pop music fans’ (about a third of the total sample) the overall response to this Bank Holiday programme was by no means as favourable. A considerable number of those reporting clearly regarded it as noisy, boring and a waste of time, and several who ‘listened out of curiosity’, failed to see any reason for the Beatles’ popularity.”